TWIST OF FAITH

The arrest of two Kerala nuns in Chhattisgarh over charges of conversion and human trafficking has put the BJP and the Catholic leadership in Kerala in a tight spot

- BY NIRMAL JOVIAL

Before she became a nun, Sr Vandana Francis was known as Mercy. Her brother Cherian Mathew said the name mirrored her very being since childhood. “She was always instinctively drawn to the suffering of others, and it was this deep-rooted empathy that led her to a life of mission—serving the poor and those in pain in distant lands,” he said.

Sr Preethi Mary’s story is not very different. “There was a convent and a small clinic run by nuns near our home,” recalled her brother Baiju M.V. Maliyekkal. “As a child, she would go to church with them and grew up seeing them.”

Today, the two men are waiting for their sisters to be released from the Central Jail in Durg, Chhattisgarh—an incarceration they call unprecedented and illegal.

Vandana and Preethi, both in their 50s, were arrested at Durg Railway Station on July 25. They serve the Assisi Sisters of Mary Immaculate (ASMI), a congregation under the Syro-Malabar Church based in Cherthala, Kerala. Three young tribal women from Narayanpur district in Chhattisgarh were with the nuns when they were arrested along with a Sukhman Mandavi. The arrests followed a complaint by the Bajrang Dal, alleging human trafficking and forced religious conversion. The situation escalated after a railway ticket examiner questioned the group, and one woman—allegedly under pressure—stated that she was being taken without consent, though her family later denied this.

Lok Sabha member N.K. Premachandran, who visited the nuns in jail on July 29, told THE WEEK that the nuns faced a terrible ordeal, including mob violence at the railway station and the police station. said Premachandran. The nuns were taking the women for domestic help jobs in convents with the permission of their families, he said. “After joining a convent, they could study further—many girls have done courses like auxiliary nurse midwifery and have built lives for themselves,” he noted.